The inventive concepts described herein relate to electronic devices, and more particularly, to semiconductor memory devices.
Semiconductor memory devices are generally classified as either volatile memory devices or nonvolatile memory devices. Examples of volatile memory in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and static RAM (SRAM). Examples of nonvolatile memory include electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM), ferroelectric RAM (FRAM), phase-change RAM (PRAM), magnetoresistive (MRAM), and flash memory. Volatile memory devices are characterized by the loss of data stored therein at a power-off condition, while the nonvolatile memory devices are characterized by the retention of data stored therein at a power-off condition.
Among the aforementioned examples of nonvolatile memory, flash memory (which was development from EEPROM technology) has proven to be particular popular due to its relatively high programming speed, low power consumption, and mass storage capacity. As such, flash memory has been widely adopted in the marketplace, and is implemented within a myriad of different types of data storage devices, such as solid state drives (SSD), SD cards, and memory cards, just to name a few.